Szewczyk and His Second 10-Ball Title: When Safety Beats Firepower

In the deciding rack of the fourth set, Wojciech Szewczyk leaned over the table, his jump cue in hand, and cut the one-ball with a stroke that hopped over two blockers between the cue ball and the pocket. In 10-Ball, where every ball and pocket must be called, that shot does not permit a millimetre of error in target. If I had to pick one moment to explain his second World 10-Ball Championship, I would pick this one, rather than any break and run across the whole tournament. A jump-cue cut is not the shot of a firepower player. It is the shot of someone who accepted that the table had presented a position that could not be solved in a straight line, and who had prepared for that possibility in advance. That shot was an escape, and in my experience following professional pool matches, escapes decide titles more often than people admit. The championship took place in Ho Chi Minh City. This is not a minor detail. A world-level event staged in Vietnam, with a hometown player in Duong Quoc Hoang competing in the bracket, places the commercial centre of pool in Southeast Asia, not in the United Kingdom or the United States. The format is the anchor for understanding the whole story. Each set was a race to 4 racks, and the match was best-of-5 sets. Szewczyk won 4-1, lost 1-4, won 4-2, then won 4-3. A four-set final, where each set can be erased by a single dry break. For a control player like him, this structure was both a defensive line and a trap: it gave him more resets, but it also gave his opponent more resets. On the other side of the table stood Eklent Kaci of Albania, the 2026 and 2026 World 10-Ball champion. Kaci arrived at the final on a relentless comeback run, winning five straight matches from a set behind, three of them decided in a final set. That is data about nerve, and also data about load. The four-set final was the first time in days he had to play without a cushion to fall back on when trailing. Reduced to conditions, Kaci was not underrated. A comparison figure released during the week showed Pehlivanovic playing nearly nine hours on the Friday. Kaci had no equivalent number published, but his match volume at this event sat in the tournament's highest bracket. The data suggests that winning comebacks always carry an accumulating cost. The dry break that surfaced late in the final was not random. In 10-Ball, each break is designed to control both the object ball and the cue-ball angle for the next shot, and executing a break and then reading the cue-ball position cold requires a kind of clarity that evaporates easily when a set reaches its final rack. I rewatched the footage and saw what I usually see in such moments: the cue did not tremble, but the rise from the shot came roughly a third of a second faster than normal. Looking only at the beautiful pots, one would construct a different story about this tournament. Szewczyk had the jump-cue cut in the fourth set, and he had table clearances from his own break at pivotal moments. But the true spine of the entire campaign was safety. He won the majority of tactical exchanges, pinning the cue ball in positions that forced Kaci to choose between a risky shot and surrendering the table. In 10-Ball, where every shot must be called, safety is not merely defensive technique. It is a way of forcing an opponent to manufacture his own errors. I have tracked Szewczyk's competitive career since his first title, when he beat Cristopher Tevez in the final. The roughly four years between those two titles is often framed as a quiet period. For me, it was a period in which he reached the final 16 in four of the last five seasons. Fidelity to a high standard is what scoreboards tend to miss, because it produces no single shot for the highlight reel. Kaci had three dry breaks in the final, plus a couple of errors he himself described as uncharacteristic. The third set, won 4-2 by Szewczyk, was decided more by gifts than by brilliance. Kaci also missed the three-ball at a moment when the door into the set was still open. This is why I do not read this final as a statement about Szewczyk's peak level. I read it as a statement about his risk management. One point deserves sobriety. Kaci's defeat does not prove Szewczyk is the better player overall. In this format, a control player always holds a structural advantage over a player whose route into a match is more explosive. The balls do not lie about technique, but the way they are counted always lies a little about who is better. When the match ends, the number lies more artfully than the player. Alongside that structural edge, error is where reality signs its name. A 2-6-7 combination was misplayed by Szewczyk late, and Kaci could not punish it. That is not luck. It is a trace showing who kept their structure while the other lost his. So what actually changes after this title? Szewczyk now holds two world titles, numerically level with Kaci and Ko Ping-Chung of Chinese Taipei. But his media presence clearly trails his results. The champion's cheque at this event was 80,000 US dollars. In a sport where major titles can fall to four or five contenders across four different countries in a single year, that low profile is a commercial gap rather than a competitive one. One detail made me pause longer than the jump cue. Szewczyk won three sets and lost one, but not a single set across the entire Vietnam campaign forced him into a deciding set. At world-championship level, never being pushed to a match decider is a control marker that is almost impossible to fake. It does not appear on a résumé, but it lives inside a great many racks. I want to call him a player of cold data, but that would be wrong. He held back tears after winning, and he did so at both titles. He is a player who understands that his career lasts longer than a footballer's, and that four years between titles is not a void but a rest. Viewed more broadly, a world championship in Vietnam, with a late bracket drawing names from Poland, Albania, Chinese Taipei, Germany, Spain, Japan and the Philippines, sketches a power map with no single owning nation. Europe holds the sharp end; Asia holds the stage and the depth. This is a fundamental contrast with snooker, where power remains tied to the islands of northwestern Europe. My question for the next event is not whether Szewczyk wins again. It is whether the media recognises who he is before the next cycle turns a control player into a name mentioned every time safety comes up. A second quiet title is usually read as repetition. I see it as a reminder that structure always outlives the lights.